[June 21, 2007] Cistera Leads Charge Towards Application Platforms Tweet Contact Centers today face numerous choices when designing a telephony system to meet their needs. Not only do they have the ability to choose between multiple applications—they also have the ability to choose between Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, and traditional legacy systems. For some, this could be a painful choice—do you choose an old standard, one with which you may be more familiar, or do you take the technology plunge and go with a system that could dramatically reduce administration costs, as well as offer more flexibility and growth than you’ve ever had with a legacy system? With VoIP, convergence is key. More and more contact centers have come to understand that offering multiple applications on one single platform provides a new level of scalability. Benchmark Portal, a national research firm specializing in contact center best practices, published a survey last month showing contact center preferences for “all in one,” or unified systems versus “multi-point” communication systems. "Our findings show that, in general, all-in-one communications systems contain the same core ‘best-of-breed' applications required by contact centers as their multi-point counterparts, and that they come with the advantages of fewer interfaces, lower support requirements, simplified management, and easier access to performance data across applications," said BenchmarkPortal research analyst, Bruce Belfiore. Among the survey findings, the report showed that unified systems were preferred over multi-point systems based on their ability to support additional applications with virtually no modification or integration issues, and for their ability to lower administrative costs by reducing support staff by a full 25 percent. With traditional legacy phone systems, customers had to purchase different applications from different vendors to fulfill their business needs. For example, if a contact center needs call recording, as well as a paging system, they would need at least two vendors to fulfill their needs. If they also needed a directory service, they would need to add another vendor to the list for fulfillment. With IP telephony, however, one single platform can fulfill all of those needs, and more. Fortunately for contact centers, there are some IP telephony application companies stepping up to the plate, such as Cistera Networks (News - Alert), of Dallas, Texas, and Interactive Intelligence, based out of Indianapolis, Indiana. “Our customers are demanding more functionality on their IP communications investment, without an increase in the cost and complexity of delivering it,” says Greg Royal, CTO and founder of Cistera Networks. “They want a single point of integration into the IP PBX (News - Alert)—single point provisioning. Not just unified communications, but unified administration of this functionality. It is no longer acceptable to have five different systems to provision an IP telephony system—you need multiple application functionality without the administrative overhead.” Cistera Networks has delivered its Enterprise Platform for IP communications over the past three years—predominantly to mid-market, such as AMOCO Federal Credit Union, and Fortune 500 customers, such as Conoco Phillips, First America and HTE Sungard. "Although the Cisco system is in itself a very capable system, AMOCO was looking for 'best-of-breed' in call center call recording, on-demand recording, voice paging, and text messaging. Cistera Networks provided a total solution that is easy to implement, manage, and maintain" commented Tommy Green, AMOCO's Vice President of Information Systems. "The Cistera solution has the same 'look and feel' of the Cisco CallManager, providing ease of learning, which is very important when learning to maintain a completely new phone system. It is very tightly integrated with the Cisco system, making it simple to integrate its feature functionality into any phone on the network. Because of the tight integration, any feature in Cistera can be easily turned on or off for any end user." As the march toward IP telephony continues for both Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) and hosted business communications, the demand for these platforms will increase in the marketplace as CIOs and IT managers come to grips with how to manage this change while meeting the increasing expectations of business users. Voice over IP (VoIP) X A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more Internet Protocol (IP) X IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data in packets over the Internet. I...more [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]